Global business sentiment back to pre-recession levels

Reports over the past few days have added to the belief that the economic recovery was gaining strength across the globe. Interestingly, the latest Survey of Business Confidence of the World by Moody’s Economy.com concluded that “global business sentiment improved a bit more in early April and is now as strong as it has been since summer 2007 just before the Great Recession began”.

What came as a surprise is that “expectations about the economy’s performance were as strong as they have ever been”. Strong stuff!

Other noteworthy Survey results were:

Sales have improvement notably in recent weeks.

Businesses were no longer cutting payrolls and inventories, but remained wary about adding to them.

South American businesses were very upbeat, while North American businesses remained more cautious.

I prefer hard data to survey data as a matter of course, but there can be little argument that the results of the Moody’s Survey augers well for global growth later this year.